Louis
Place
Johanna Hedva: Writing for No One
Thursday, June 25, 2026
4pm PT / 6pm CT / 7pm ET / 11pm GMT
via zoom / sliding scale registration here
Writing for No One is a workshop about a chewy, fun, and strange technical problem: what happens when a writer composes for an audience that cannot answer back: God, the dead, the unborn, the indifferent, a future reader one hundred years from now, or the self that may never arrive. Writers who work this way face different formal pressures than those writing for immediate publics, and some of us do it intentionally, and sometimes we don't. The concept of one's audience at all is often speculative and opaque, and in this workshop we'll reach right in there. I've said for years that, as much as a writer must learn to write, we must also learn how to be read. We'll also consider the stakes of writing that consciously refuses to consider its audience, and what happens in that move. And what about when we unintentionally fail to consider our reader? What about when the myopic, insular, hermetic, hubristic, and solipsistic creep in? Moving through figures from medieval anchorites and Buddhist monks on their deathbeds, to James Baldwin, John Keats, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, we’ll look at what happens when writing becomes less a performance of communication than a gesture for sending something into, and in turn composing with, silence.
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Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician from Los Angeles. Hedva is the author of the 2024 essay collection How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, which won the Amber Hollibaugh Award for LGBTQ Social Justice Writing. They are also the author of the novel Your Love Is Not Good, which Kirkus called a “hellraising, resplendent must read,” and the novel On Hell, which was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018. In 2020, they published Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, performances, and essays. Their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House (2021) and The Sun and the Moon (2019). Their artwork has been shown internationally at Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the 2025 Seoul Mediacity Biennial, the LA Architecture and Design Museum, The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Performance Space New York, the 14th Shanghai Biennial, and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich, among others. Their writing has appeared in e-flux, Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, Topical Cream, Spike, Mousse, Die Zeit, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016, has been translated into 11 languages. In 2024, they were a Disability Futures Fellow, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2026, they were awarded a USA Fellowship, and listed on ArtReview's Power 100 list.
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